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HONG KONG – Chinese communities began hosting Tuesday's Year of the Pig, ushering in the Lunar New Year with prayers, family celebrations and shopping sprees after embarking on the largest annual migration to world.
In mainland China, last week, hundreds of millions of people stormed trains, buses, cars and planes to join their families and friends, emptying the country's mega-cities. a large part of the migrant labor force.
The celebrations will take place all over the world, from the century-old Chinese communities of South-East Asia to the newly established Chinatowns of Sydney, London, Vancouver, Los Angeles and beyond.
The most important holiday of the Chinese calendar marks the New Year with a fortnight of festivities as families reunite with dumplings and exchange gifts and red envelopes stuffed with money.
Pigs symbolize the wealth and wealth of Chinese culture, and this year's holidays bring a proliferation of merchandise, greetings and pork decorations.
During the spring holiday season – a 40-day period known as "Chunyun" – the Chinese mbades will be on the move, recording some 3 billion trips, Chinese official media reported.
The busy streets and arteries were unusually empty in Beijing on Monday, with many shops and restaurants closed until next week.
A growing number of Chinese people are also choosing to travel abroad, booking family trips to Thailand, Japan and other destinations of choice.
According to the Xinhua official news agency, 7 million Chinese tourists will go overseas this year to the spring festival this year, citing figures from the Chinese travel agency Ctrip.
Prayers, greetings
In Hong Kong, the flower markets were filled with residents picking orchids, tangerines and peach blossoms to decorate their homes – with stalls also offering a dizzying array of pillows, tote bags and stuffed toys. pig motifs.
Thousands of petitioners carrying incense crammed into the city's famous Wong Tai Sin Temple during the night, a popular place to mark the first New Year prayers.
In Malaysia (60% of the population is Muslim and a quarter ethnic Chinese), some shopping centers have chosen not to display decorations to pigs, while some stores have kept them indoors.
But shoppers and shopkeepers said it was usual in a country where the Muslim majority was sensitive to an animal considered impure by Islam and that it was generally not there. had a lot of controversy this year.
Right next to Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, which also has a large population of Chinese stock, the Lunar New Year is a holiday.
Events such as traditional lion dances take place in decorated public spaces, while supermarkets cater to moon cakes and tangerines.
In Japan, the capital's famous Tokyo Tower was to turn red to celebrate the New Year – a first for the city.
Parades and lion dances in western cities such as New York and London should attract a large crowd.
Peoples respectful of Beijing, such as Pakistani President Arif Alvi and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, hailed the New Year in China.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen used her social media accounts to present a political soap opera in Beijing with a message highlighting the island's democratic credentials and linguistic pluralism.
"In Taiwan, we are able to maintain our cultural traditions," she said in a video in which she pronounced the New Year's greetings in five Chinese languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, Teochew and Cantonese.
Critics and minorities have long accused the mainland authorities of pushing Mandarin at the expense of other languages.
China still regards Taiwan as part of its territory to be reunified, although both sides have been governed separately since the end of the civil war in 1949.
Relations between Taipei and Beijing had a difficult start in 2019 after Xi Jinping delivered a bellicose speech last month, describing the island's unification with the continent as "inevitable."
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